There will be two optional excursions on the afternoon of Saturday 27th July. One excursion will be to Netley Abbey in Southampton and HMS Victory in Portsmouth. The second excursion will be to Chawton House Library and Jane Austen's House Museum. Delegates can only register for one of these optional excursions and will need to do this when registering for the conference.
HMS Victory at the Royal Historical Dockyard, Portsmouth
HMS Victory was launched in 1765 at Chatham Dockyard and was commissioned in 1778. She continued in active service for the next 34 years which included her most famous moment-the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. In 1812 the Victory was retired from frontline duty and anchored in Portsmouth Harbour. For the next 110 years the Victory remained at her moorings in Portsmouth Harbour fulfilling a combination of practical and ceremonial roles. In 1922, amid fears for her continued survival, the Victory was moved into Portsmouth's Royal Naval Dockyard and placed in No2 Dry Dock. Work then began on restoring the Victory to her 'fighting' 1805 condition and continues today.
Netley Abbey
Netley Abbey is the most complete surviving Cistercian monastery in southern England, with almost all the walls of its 13th-century church still standing, along with many monastic buildings. After the Dissolution, the buildings were converted into the mansion house of Sir William Paulet. Even in ruins, the abbey continued to be influential, inspiring Romantic writers and poets.
Chawton House Library and Jane Austen's House Museum
The village of Chawton is celebrated for its links to Hampshire's greatest Romantic Export, the novelist Jane Austen. This excursion will take in both her home from 1809 to her death in 1817, now the Jane Austen House Museum, and Chawton House Library, a research library of early women's writing 1660-1830, opened in 2003. Chawton House Library will be celebrating its ten-year anniversary in 2013, also the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Pride and Prejudice . The Elizabethan Manor House belonged to Jane Austen's brother, Edward, and has attractive gardens, and a newly restored seventeenth-century barn.
